...mixing
Memory and desire...
—T.S.
Eliot, The Waste Land
...ma mémoire précédait ma naissance...
—Patrick
Modiano
A Luftwaffe pilot in leather cap with goggles perched
on his forehead looks to left of camera in a photo studio in Karlsruhe
in September 1941, his gaze directed upwards towards eternity.
A shapely woman wearing headscarf, sunglasses, sweater
and tapered slacks stands beside her 1960s Peugeot 404 convertible and
enigmatically lifts her right index finger skywards for the benefit
of the photographer.
A lissom teenage girl in a dark jersey swimsuit throws
her head back in ecstasy, her eyes closed, somewhere on a Baltic beach,
sometime in the mid-1940s, seemingly oblivious to the photograph being
taken.
Marcel Ducellier—thin lips, bowtie and eyepatch—
sentenced to life for delivering confidential information to a foreign
power, presents an expressionless face to the police photographer, 29
April 1939.
Two children in Berlin in 1943 look on enraptured
as their lit sparklers shimmer before their eyes, providing the sole
light source for the photograph being taken...
Welcome to the Garden of Oblivion, the inexhaustible
planetary archive of forgotten photographic images. Anonymous gelatin
silver prints, slides, negatives, glass plates and other analogue sources
provide the starting point for the interventions shown in the following
pages. Long-forgotten snapshots and run-of-the-mill commercial photography
are retrieved from oblivion and transformed by the artifices of digital
imaging to tell imaginary stories and set imaginary scenes. The imagery
of the contemporary world is rigorously banished: what is shown belongs
to a fantasized but plausible past, a fictional retroprojection.
While the entirety of the work is photographically
based, photography is used merely as a pretext for what becomes an exercise
in post-photography. The artist plays consciously upon photography’s
essences and paradoxes: the moment of time frozen into eternity but
threatened immediately with forgetfulness and abandon; truth susceptible
of being fiction (and vice-versa); the slice of life underwritten by
a certain death.
If you really want a mind-altering experience, look at a tree.
—AC
Grayling
Every now and then he imagines what it might be like
to be a ‘real’ photographer and to extract from the simple triangulation
of human eye, machine and exterior world a pure slice of life, a magical
frozen moment.
But even in digital form he finds the mechanics and
minutiae of photography—the f-stops, aperture rings and exposure
settings—less than compelling. And as for representing the everyday
world, who does it better than the daily press? On every page a masterpiece.
But more crucially, he finds it hard to believe in the
unmediated representation of reality. No, photography for him can only
exist at the second degree: repurposed, reframed, distressed, superimposed,
double-exposed...
Nevertheless, image stock is needed and from time to
time he picks up his trusty Nikon D80 and goes on safari. Studiously avoiding
human beings and their pesky vanities and mannerisms, he chooses the forking
path of least resistance that leads to the decaying arboreal splendour
of a nearby public park.
In winter, when the leaves are no longer clothing the
naked branches of the trees, the Garden of Oblivion takes on a desolate
air. Trodden underfoot, swept by the wind, frozen by frost, the dead leaves
provide the starting point. Pick one up and what is banal to the naked
eye is rich in detail under the macro lens or the high-resolution scanner.
Cropped areas of this absurdly intricate network of veins and connecting
tissue, juxtaposed with the scales of epidermis that still remain, look
rather like aerial maps of Dresden after the fire-bombings.
And when the camera pans up towards the trees, the same
vertiginous architecture is reproduced, the same apparently haphazard
ramifications that are profiled against the dead grey sky like some kind
of mescaline-induced scribble.
But nature snaps—so often banal—are not the
object of the exercise: there is work to be done in the lab. The images
are mirrored, remirrored and blended to create strange new forms of life.
These triffids, these transgenic mutations, these re-engineered freaks
conjugate beauty and terror in their wild organic proliferation but art
has the final word, imposing its playful symmetries upon the raw material
of nature.
‘A painting of a photograph is—generally
speaking —more interesting than a photograph of a painting’,
wrote Jacobo Flores (born Jacques Florès) in one of the moleskine
notebooks in which he accumulated aphorisms, reflections and other jottings
prior to his self-inflicted death by fire in his studio in 1980 at the
age of 37. The statement resonates for anyone familiar
with Flores’ oeuvre and also reveals a posthumous paradox: his work
consists—or consisted—of paintings of photographs, paintings
that are now largely destroyed and of which all that remains today are
the testimonial photographs of the missing paintings, ghostly placeholders
for works that no longer exist. These photographs—a selection of
which are reproduced here—have now been assembled for the first time
by the Belgian scholar Raoul Gendebien in Jacobo Flores: Catalogue
raisonné.
In his introductory essay Gendebien provides the indispensable
biographical data without which Flores’ oeuvre fails to yield its
full meaning. Born in Paris during the Nazi Occupation (a period that
continued to haunt him throughout his life), the artist maintained a difficult
relationship with his father, Jean-Paul Florès (Juan Pablo Flores),
a Spanish photographer and Republican refugee who always disparaged his
son’s ‘primitive’ preference for brushes and paint. His
mother, the film actress Chantal Rodenbach, star of various forgettable
romps in the 1950s and 1960s (Le Jardin de l’Oubli, Vergüenza
torera, Sexy Safari, etc.) appears as a vain and promiscuous
character who neglected the education of Jacobo and his adored older sister
Marie-Gabrielle, a frequent subject of his painting and a strikingly beautiful
free spirit whose tragic death in 1966 at the wheel of her Jaguar XK150
cast a veil of melancholy over Flores’ life from which he never recovered.
Gendebien, cloaking himself in old-fashioned Freudian
garb, draws some startling conclusions from this family psychodrama, detecting
an ‘inverted Oedipal relation’ between painting and photography
that mirrors the tensions between father and son and positing the existence
of an incestuous bond between Jacobo and his sister. However that may
be, it can scarcely be denied that when Flores lit the match and threw
it to the petrol-soaked floor of his studio that fateful October day,
the ensuing conflagration that saw the immolation of both the artist and
his work was nothing less than an exorcism of his innermost demons.
‘Belvedere Beach,’ write Krebs and Scheidegger
in their now-classic guidebook The Diamond Coast, ‘is one
of those touristic haunts stamped with the thumbprint of some divine Art
Director, where a Mexichrome sun sets dramatically and infallibly on gaily
painted skiffs and vagabond Norwegians with nipple-rings, and whose overpriced
stores are awash with dreadfully delicate little watercolours peopled
with deliquescent fishermen tepidly dissolving into their own typicality.’
But of course that was well before what are euphemistically
known as ‘The Events’ took place. How could the authors have
possibly suspected that just a few years after penning their florid prose
in praise of this secluded paradise, those twee boutiques would be ransacked
by marauding gangs of drugged mercenaries, those globetrotting Scandinavians
would be seeking out less troubled climes to flaunt their mammary piercing,
and after a series of eco-terrorist attacks at various strategic points
along the fabled coast, those picturesque fishermen would be sitting apathetic
and threadbare on the jetties and along the shore of Belvedere Beach,
gazing mournfully out past the NO BATHING signs at the vast spoiled watery
waste that once provided their livelihood?
Apart from the usual targets—Jews, slim poets,
hairdressers—the brutal putsch performed by the so-called Monday
Militia sowed terror throughout the population at large, crippled the
tourist industry upon which the region was so dependent, and prompted
the emergence of a black market for every imaginable commodity.
And yet amidst the fear and the chaos, life continued, especially after
dark, in an atmosphere reminiscent of les années noires
of the Occupation. The funambulist Giorgio McFarlane vividly recalls:
‘At midnight the flaming youth gravitated towards Crawlspace, which
had rapidly become the no va más of Belvedere Beach nightlife.
Outside the club the customized six-wheel-drive Kalaharis were legion,
while inside Chimérique, Outrager and Silver Scream blared from
the sound system. The Submarine was the cocktail of choice: an effervescent
yaa baa tablet submerged in glühwein and served in garish
rainbow-hued Murano glass snifters. When the methamphetamine kicked in,
the change in atmosphere was palpable: out came the mah-jong tiles, the
French knitting, the angel-dust vaporizers and the miniature cylinders
of laughing gas. Then the volume was cranked down and on stage an unprepossessing
Japanese schoolgirl in kabuki make-up performed an artfully apathetic
striptease while declaiming Baudelaire in mesmeric Sprechgesang.’
It was in improbable settings such as this that the
popular resistance took root. Artists and vague noctambules posted flyers,
devised performances and circulated samizdat manifestos mocking
the governing junta and Axel Orlac in particular, the thuggish vegetarian
wheelchair-bound supremo whose charismatic sway over his armed homosexual
goons was attributed largely to the fact that it was he who provided them
with the hallucinogenic herbs under whose influence they committed their
random and extravagant atrocities.
On July 7, in the sweltering heat of a late afternoon
exacerbated by sporadic power blackouts and the subsequent lack of airconditioning,
the Belvedere Beach headquarters of the Monday Militia was dynamited by
opposition forces and immediately looted by the dissident mob prowling
the streets. The explosion had caused massive damage to the building and
in the ensuing chaos, a carefully coordinated group of pillagers wearing
the fleur-de-lis keffiyehs and glacé kid gloves of the SLF
were seen hauling large slabs of polished stone recuperated from the lobby
into a waiting pantechnicon. These were then transported to a ramshackle
neo-brutalist villa in the vicinity of Lake Veronica where they were cut
to a uniform size (two metres square) before being painstakingly chiselled
with relief figures that told a chilling allegorical tale of the putsch
and its aftermath.
These anonymous stone slabs became known as The Glyphs
and when electronic communication was eventually re-established, they
became icons of the counter-revolution. They now form part of the permanent
collection of the Belvedere Beach Museum of Contemporary Art.
The art of the azulejo—glazed coloured
tiles used for largely decorative purposes—was introduced to Spain
by the Moors, who had learned it from the Persians. The word azulejo is
derived from the Arabic word az-zulaiy, meaning “polished
stone”.
Unlike various currents of modernity that prize the
poetic quality of empty space, both the Moors and the Iberians succumbed
to the horror vacui and filled the ungodly void with often intricate
geometric patterns.
One of the salient attractions of Madrid’s Parque
del Buen Retiro is the Palacio de Cristal, a metal and glass structure
designed by Ricardo Velázquez Bosco and inspired by Paxton’s
Crystal Palace. Constructed in 1887 for the Philippines Exhibition, it
functioned as a greenhouse for exotic plants but now houses minimalist
and largely meaningless contemporary art installations.
Running around the perimeter of the stone base is a
repetitive strip of azulejos—many of them pleasingly cracked
and distressed—that neatly echo the emptiness of the building they
gird and signal its status as a giant transparent frame. Each panel consists
of 24 individual tiles and represents an empty cartouche festooned with
ribbons, leaves and bunches of grapes and presided over by winged ducks
and gryphon-like creatures.
The vacant frame, a classic Western trope of decorative
futility, is an example of what Kant calls the parergon—something
that enhances the central subject (the ergon), without detracting
from it. Except that here the parergon is the ergon: the
empty frame is the work, just as the transparent glass shell is
the building.
Just 500 metres from the Palacio de Cristal is the Casa Árabe,
a cultural and linguistic institute that early in 2010 was showing the
film-cycle Laberinto de pasiones: amor y deseo en el cine árabe,
revolving around notions of gender and sexuality in modern Arabic cinema.
Casting an eye over the garish handpainted posters for
the exhibition with their starcrossed lovers, sultry belly dancers and
cruel moustachioed caliphs, I thought it would be interesting to transplant
this content and populate the languishing empty frames of the Palacio
de Cristal, thereby creating a kind of Hispano-Moorish mashup that would
not only have decorative appeal but also hint at weightier themes: the
intertwining of Spanish and Moorish cultures and the shifting balance
of power between them throughout history. Or to frame it in Freudian terms,
the return of the repressed.
